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No, Donald Trump Isn't the American Version of Brexit

The Republican candidate apparently wants to be called "Mr. Brexit." But there are a lot of differences between the anti-EU referendum and the angry orange candidate.
​Donald Trump visiting his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, on June 24, 2016. Photo by Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty images.

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, that irascible scamp, decided to take to Twitter, as he so often does, and announced: "They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!" Then, uncharacteristically, he went silent, leaving the media to speculate about what the hell he meant.

Broadly, the United Kingdom's decision to get out of the European Union was made in defiance of bankers and other elites, and was a rejection of the logic of globalization in favor of a "take care of your own first" type of nationalism. The victory of the Leave vote in the June referendum also caught many people off guard. The parallels are pretty clear: Trump, like Leave, is all about sticking it to the man, giving voice to the voiceless.

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Unsurprisingly, Trump has been a big fan of Brexit ever since someone explained it to him a couple months ago. "These voters stood up for their nation—they put the United Kingdom first, and they took their country back," Trump's campaign wrote in a fundraising email just after the Brexit vote. "With your help, we're going to do the exact same thing on Election Day 2016 here in the United States of America."

So Thursday wasn't the first time Trump has portrayed himself as being the American reboot of a British original. If he starts highlighting Brexit in his speeches, it would be a new iteration of his nationalist "America First" strategy—one that would likely be embraced by his new far-right campaign "CEO" Steve Bannon, and not likely to be endorsed by those Republicans still hoping Trump will "pivot" back to a more traditional campaign.

Though pro-Brexit politicians and Trump both sound the same broad, angry notes—as do many nationalist politicians across Europe—there are a host of reasons why Trump's new self-proclaimed "MR. BREXIT" nickname is inaccurate. Here are a few:

The Polls on Brexit Were Close, Unlike the US Presidential Polls

For the last couple of years, polls in the UK, for whatever reason, have been wrong a lot of the time, and failed to predict the Leave triumph. But in the days leading up to the vote, polls did show that it was close, making the result surprising but not totally shocking.

The polls have been less kind to Trump, showing him consistently behind Hillary Clinton, both nationwide and in key battleground states. The election is still a long ways away, and Trump is far from eliminated—but the Leave vote was much more popular in the UK than Trump is in the US right now.

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Britain Is Whiter Than America

The anti-immigrant sentiment at the heart of both Trump and the Leave campaign's appeal isn't explicitly rooted in race—but on the other hand, c'mon. Trump has portrayed Muslim immigrants as potential terrorists and called Mexicans rapists and criminals; his appeals to black voters have been tone deaf; maybe he's not a white nationalist, but white nationalists sure love him.

Meanwhile, just as non-white people don't generally like Trump, non-white British voters generally backed Remain. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Leave campaign was racist, but just like Trump's campaign, it appealed to a fair number of racists. For obvious and good reasons, people of color tend to be wary of causes that unite large numbers of angry white people.

The problem for Trump is that at last count, the UK was about 87 percent white, compared to 77 percent for the US. If a political movement is looking to harness white resentment, there's just more of it available in Britain than America.

The Brexit Campaign Wasn't About Left Versus Right

The Trump–Clinton contest is obviously partisan. Sure, you have some diehard Bernie Sanders supporters threatening to vote for Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or to just stay home, and some Never Trump Republicans going over to Clinton's side—but most people are staying in their lane. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 82 percent of likely Democratic voters would back Clinton over Trump; and despite the Republican candidate's troubles, he still has the support of 72 percent of likely Republican voters.

Brexit was a trickier beast to pin down. Even though the leading voices of the Leave campaign were right-wing types like then–UKIP Leader Nigel Farage and Conservative MP Boris Johnson, there were some leftists who wanted out of the EU for their own reasons. The particulars of the Brexit battle are too complicated and British to get into here, but in the end only 63 percent of Labour voters cast Remain ballots, and only 58 percent of Tories supported Leave. Brexit couldn't have happened without support from some Labour voters—and Trump is not going to get the equivalent support from Democrats.

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Trump Is a Person, and a Lot of People Hate That Person

It's true that some of Trump's stated policies have the same kind of cross-party appeal that Brexit did. His statements on trade, for instance, mirror what leftists have been saying about free-trade agreements since even before NAFTA was adopted. But Clinton's strategy so far has not been to attack Trump's platform—which shifts depending on his mood, anyway—but to paint him as a dangerous, erratic figure, a bad role model who is simply too unhinged to lead the country.

The Leave campaign might have lost if it had had to depend on the personalities of its most public faces. Farage, for instance, couldn't win a seat in the British Parliament in 2015. But Britons didn't have to like, or even trust, Farage to vote for Leave. On the other hand, Americans who don't trust Trump can't pull the lever for him.

Maybe that's why Trump wants to be known as Mr. Brexit from now on: He knows that he won't be able to win running as Mr. Trump.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.